Jo Nesbø - "The Redeemer"

Where many Scandi-crime novelists show glimpses of the underside of their social-democratic homelands but provide at least a level of redemption by the end of the case, Norway's Jo Nesbø seems to prefer not to. His main series character Harry Hole, at least, is all-too-frequently exposed to the very worst that Oslo has to offer - and his personal life as a recovering alcoholic with a sister in long-term care with genetic disabilities doesn't seem to provide much hope either.

2005's The Redeemer (translated from the Norwegian Frelseren in 2009) picks up where the earlier The Devil's Star left off. Hole has exposed a gun-runner with ties to organised crime known as "The Prince" over the previous two novels, and while he has achieved a level of fame as a result, he remains unpopular with many of his colleagues. More to the point, his superior Bjarne Møller is leaving for a posting in Bergen, and Hole is acutely aware that it has often been Møller's intervention which has kept him on the force.
There is a fair bit of back-story here, and the Hole novels are certainly not ones to jump into "mid-stream". Until comparatively recently, though, this was the only way to do so, as Nesbø has suffered the fate of having his novels translated in the wrong order from Norwegian. It wasn't until 2012 and 2013 that the first two instalments of the story were available in English, despite their original publication in the last years of last century. As a result, new readers are strongly advised to begin with The Bat and work their way forwards - even if nothing else, the occasional references to Hole's investigations in Australia will make sense.

The Redeemer takes place in the lead-up to Christmas, which is evocatively described throughout the narrative. We begin with an impressive polyphonic sequence in which Hole investigates a suspected drug-related suicide, some of the key witnesses for the present investigation establish themselves anda mysterious hitman conducts his job in Paris, before moving on to Oslo as well.
In typically Nesbø style, Hole's investigation of the suicide begins in medias res, and there really isn't an awful lot explaining his leaps of intuition until he resolves the matter over the confusion of his partner, Jack Halvorsen. It does serve, though, as a good potted reminder of the unorthodox and occasionally dangerous methods that Hole uses, as well as providing an update on some of the other recurring characters in the series..
Things really kick off, though, as it becomes apparent that the other characters we met earlier are members of the Salvation Army performing Christmas carols on Egertorget in central Oslo. One of these performers is the one killed by our mysterious hitman, and so the investigation begins.
But that's not all. Due to an unexpected snowstorm, the hitman is forced to spend an extra night in Oslo, where he discovers that the performer he killed was the wrong man.

As a synopsis like that would indicate, this isn't the kind of novel which features an awful lot of rumination by any of the characters. There are some very effective vignettes of the hitman's memories of war-time Croatia (the title of the novel is drawn from his codename of mali spasitelj, "The Little Redeemer") and the brutality of that conflict, but most of what's going to happen here is high-speed chasing by the police and frantic attempts by the killer to stay one step ahead of the law, while attempting to do what he came for in the first place.
Taken purely as a pedal-to-the-metal thriller, The Redeemer misses the mark at times. There's a romantic subplot of sorts which doesn't add anything at all to the main action, and frankly features baffling motives for both parties, but viewing the novel purely in those terms is a mistake.

Hole realises early in the piece that this was a professional hit, rather than simply a one-off crime. He therefore needs to start piecing together the clues to work out who could possibly have wanted a young man in the Salvation Army dead - an answer which takes in everything from the religious morals of what is still quite a closed community through to shady property deals in the centre of the city.
Geographically, too, Hole needs to range between a meeting with Møller in Bergen and a brief trip to Zagreb as it becomes apparent that the killer hails from Croatia. This last, in typical Hole fashion, risks getting him in serious trouble with his new supervisor.

The eventual resolution of the tangled web here is delivered at a similarly high speed to the rest of the plot. While it ties up the loose ends, it does play slightly loosely with the reader, particularly as it deals with a key scene in which Halvorsen is attacked. It also seems slightly implausible for some of the issues of identity to have been ignored in the way that they are, particularly in the post-9/11 world.

To return to the topic of the back-story here, there is a final kicker in the "Prince" story-arc in the epilogue which I certainly didn't see coming. I won't say that it was a true blind-siding, though, as Nesbø's ability with story-arcs is uneven at best. Major events in the relationships between characters seem to take place between novels and are only hinted at, rather than explained fully. Even an element of the "Prince" investigation seems to have taken place in the space between novels, which is a shame as this had become quite an intriguing sub-plot.
Again, the point needs to be made that Nesbø's Norway is much darker even than Mankell's Sweden ever was. In George Martin-esque fashion, he's certainly not averse to killing central characters off, so never get attached to anyone in these novels. Additionally, he's also a fan of the course of action which Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot occasionally took, which is that of letting the criminal be "judged" naturally, rather than by the legal system. That happens here, in rather spectacular fashion.

While I can't recommend Nesbø to precisely the same audience as I would Mankell, I can certainly give him a very strong recommendation. Hole is a difficult character to appreciate, but well worth the effort.

Four stars.

Henning Mankell - "Sidetracked"

If there is one fictional detective the reader constantly wishes would get a lucky break, it must be Kurt Wallander. His personal life isn't pretty, and from his third novel appearance onwards he seems to have more than the typical level of Swedish existential guilt, particularly after he shoots a man in the process of stopping an assassination.

1995's Villospår (translated into English as Sidetracked in 1999) seems to show Wallander in a much better place. His tentative relationship with Baiba Liepa - a woman he met in Latvia while investigating a crime linked to that country - has developed to the extent that she's flying to Copenhagen to meet him, his daughter Linda seems keen to have him play a more central role in her life, and even his irascible father seems to have calmed down. Besides which, it's close on Midsummer.
All is not well, however. Wallander is called to a farm outside Ystad, where a young woman sets herself on fire in front of him. While Wallander and his colleagues are attempting to process this horrific event, a former Minister of Justice is found murdered and scalped. The reader meets this victim slightly before his death, and while the man is hardly shown to be a paragon of virtue, there's definitely a level of sadism here which makes one sit up and take notice.

Henning Mankell's interests in social justice and the dark underbelly of Sweden are very much to the fore here, with a plot extending as far as the Dominican Republic in order for the twists and turns to make sense. The body count climbs higher than Mankell has achieved previously, and for once there is a real sense of danger to Wallander himself - as well as to Linda, who emerges as a much more three-dimensional character than she had previously been in the series.
As the premise might indicate, this is definitely a very dark novel. Sadism is a key ingredient in the murders, as well as elsewhere in the plot, and seems to arrive with minimal warning. There are also a few glimpses into the mind of the murderer, which become suitably foreboding late in the novel but are also quite disconcerting at times.

Mankell's growing ease with the techniques of writing a crime novel are also on show here. The scenes from the killer's perspective are a very strong example of this, as they begin by implying a completely different motive from the one actually in play. Wallander and his colleagues frequently debate whether they're viewing the case the wrong way, and as the tension mounts it becomes apparent that the reader could easily have done the same thing.
There are in fact one or two scenes which feel cinematic in a very good way. A relatively innocent sequence involving missing front door keys morphs into something very sinister, and the moment at which Wallander realises a key piece of evidence was under his nose all along is more than a bit spine-tingling.
And yet, Mankell never ceases to play fair with his readers. The evidence which finally clinches the murderer's identity (or, for the reader, the murderer's motive) has been in plain sight for some time and was even discussed by multiple characters earlier in the novel. Just as in the classic "Golden Age" novels of yesteryear, you can't blame the author when it becomes apparent that you missed it.

Mankell even has the chance to add some extra realism to the plot by having the Ystad police betting on the 1994 World Cup, which Sweden memorably finished third in. Wallander is resolutely not into the sport, but is convinced to bet anyway, at one point predicting a ludicrous scoreline he's talked out of.
The killer even takes advantage of a key group-stage match to strike, and Mankell is careful to have the results of the matches link to reality. We only get as far as Sweden's Round of 16 match against Saudi Arabia, but there are asides about drunken brawls regarding the performance of the then-Swedish goalkeeper and other very important matters in footballing terms.

The only weak note for which Mankell can be critiqued here is the rather odd characterisation of officer Sjösten, a colleague of Wallander's in Malmö who discovers the final victim. Sjösten is presented in a very sympathetic light for several chapters, before he is suddenly required (purely for reasons of dramatic tension) to be confrontational towards a witness.
While real people are of course made of both light and dark sides, Sjösten's sudden change of personality doesn't seem to make sense and I wouldn't be surprised if there had in fact been another character involved here who perhaps didn't make it past the editing stage.

The translation by Steven Murray is generally strong (characters don't use quite so many British turns of phrase as Laurie Thompson has them doing in The Man Who Smiled, for example), but there are occasionally clunky moments.
One such is the tendency - by both translators - to render the Swedish Systembolaget as "the state off-licence", or even "the off-licence". While the concept of an "off-licence" makes sense to British readers, the Scandinavian concept of the government having the monopoly on the bottle-shop sector really doesn't seem to be conveyed by this term. Most other translations from Swedish (to say nothing of those from Icelandic or Norwegian, where the concept also exists) render the term either as "the state liquor store" or (as in the Millennium series) "the System store", which doesn't sacrifice as much clarity as Murray or Thompson may think. The choice of terminology is rendered even stranger, in fact, when we note that Murray (under the pen-name Reg Keeland) is the translator of Stieg Larsson's trilogy into English.
More jarring, though, is the reference to "rape fields" throughout southern Sweden. While "canola" only covers one particular cultivar of this plant, it seems very unusual that Murray didn't render the Swedish raps as "rapeseed". The girl being discovered in the farmer's "rape field" is an unfortunately weird moment (although, at the risk of a spoiler, perhaps it's not the most ridiculous choice of term), and Wallander's reaction to smelling "all the rape" as summer warms up is also a bit strange. Nonetheless, we can overlook this issue in the name of a real page-turner of a novel.

In many ways, this is the point at which Henning Mankell became the big name he remained for the rest of his career. A truly absorbing novel with a genuinely surprising twist at the heart of the plot.

Five stars.

Jonathan Nasaw - "Fear Itself"

In the wake of the success of The Silence of the Lambs, there was a spate of novels specifically looking at serial killers, and seemingly the more twisted and freakish the better. Jonathan Nasaw's Fear Itself, from 2003, fits squarely into this category.

The best short summary I could give here would be to imagine Quentin Tarantino writing Hannibal Lecter. In prospect, this should give a high-octane, wittily self-aware plot with some moments of over-the-top gore. Sadly, Nasaw isn't Tarantino, so it falls a little bit flat.
The novel focuses on soon-to-be-retired FBI agent EL Pender and his replacement-to-be Linda Abruzzi. On Pender's last day before retirement, he receives a letter from Dorie Bell, a woman with a crippling phobia of masks. Bell had attended a conference for people with "Specific Phobias", and since that time several of the attendees have died in ways which seem unusual given their phobias (an acrophobe throwing himself from the top of a tall building, for example), and she is concerned that something more sinister is afoot. Oddly, the blurb on the back of the copy I've read misstates some of these details, although it's insignificant in plot terms.
So much the preamble. The plot then sees Pender handling the investigation in California, where Bell lives and where he's gone on a golfing trip to celebrate his retirement, while Abruzzi conducts other parts of the investigation from her desk outside Washington. We're also treated - surprisingly early, by the normal standards for this sort of novel - to the identity of the killer himself, and his attempts to avoid capture and deal with his deteriorating mental state.

There are several good ideas afoot here. The idea of a killer who thrives on fear for the sake of fear is unusual, and in theory could produce a very interesting novel. The plot device of having the investigation conducted on opposite coasts of the USA also works well, although it's rather more hackneyed than Nasaw seems to think.
The difficulty is that Nasaw is a novelist who is very much enamoured of the cliche. Pender isn't just a soon-to-be-retired agent, he's a giant of a man with a high profile in the FBI and a history of rubbing his colleagues the wrong way, so we know almost immediately that he'll have a series of strokes of good luck, as well as a heart of gold. Abruzzi's superiors are petty bureaucrats (Nasaw even renders the term "bureau-crats", to make the point clearer), so the only purpose they serve is to get in the way. Abruzzi herself suffers from a form of multiple sclerosis, and Serious Narrative Tension is provided by having her fall over at the wrong time on a few occasions.
But it's the dialogue which really brings Fear Itself down. Pender's comic foil through the early part of the novel is his retired-profiler friend Sid Dolitz (who, incidentally, is clearly being played by Woody Allen in the film Nasaw so clearly wishes he'd written), who keeps delivering witticisms. At one point, Pender asks if Dolitz thinks he (Pender) has drunk too much, with the response being "For a small Irish county, no. For a human being, yes." Clunky dialogue like this continues throughout, with police in the middle of tense moments being able to deliver a snappy line or two, and even a nearly-victim of the killer finding time to correct Pender's references to films. Again, Tarantino can get away with this sort of thing, but it's a very tight line to walk.

There's also a strange lack of place and time in Fear Itself. It was published, as mentioned earlier, in 2003, so while investigations are done online we're certainly not in the realms of smartphones and social media. More unusually, though, the FBI characters seem to divide American history into "pre-Oklahoma City" and "post-Oklahoma City" eras, and everyone is worried about Y2K (we're in late 1999, plot-wise). While 2003 was perhaps relatively soon after the World Trade Centre atrocities to include a reference to that, it feels very quaint to read a novel in which the characters haven't experienced this epochal event, particularly where they "could have done".
Nasaw is an American author, which makes his lack of engagement with any of the geography in the novel even stranger. Events take place in San Francisco, rural Wisconsin and the outskirts of Washington DC, but there's no sense of place anywhere. San Francisco is simply an area in which people live, and despite the buildup to the final events in Washington, there's only one glancing reference to the fact that it's a large city (Abruzzi isn't sure how quickly she can get to her office at one point). The novel could really have occurred anywhere.

All up, this reads as a good idea executed by someone simply not up to it. A lot of American serial-killer thrillers suffer from being written in a way which screams "please option this as a script", and Fear Itself is no exception. It's entirely possible that this could make a semi-decent film, but as a novel it just doesn't cut it.

Two stars.

Henning Mankell - "The Man Who Smiled"

As with many of his Scandinavian brethren, Henning Mankell's novels were translated to English out of order. In contrast to many others, Mankell's passing in 2015 means that readers at least know that there's a finite number of these novels and can therefore re-assemble the "full story" of Inspector Kurt Wallander, one of the more well-rounded series characters in contemporary crime fiction.

The Man Who Smiled is chronologically the fourth Wallander, having appeared in the original Swedish as Mannen som log in 1994. It was, eccentrically, the seventh translated to English, not seeing an Anglophone publication until 2005. I say "eccentrically", as Wallander's personal life is a key theme in the series, and while it's complicated enough as it is, there seems little reason to mix things up further.

Speaking of Wallander's personal life, that's precisely where this novel opens. Wallander ended The White Lioness in dramatic fashion, fatally shooting a suspect in a tense chase over foggy terrain and doubting his choice even though his colleagues felt that it was entirely justified. The intervening time before the opening of The Man Who Smiled seems to have been tough on him, as he's spent nearly 18 months on sick leave from the Ystad police and actively considering retirement.
In fact, he's been doing more than just "considering" it, having come to the conclusion that it's time to retire, when he's visited by a lawyer he knows. Sten Torstensson, the visitor, explains that he is concerned about the investigation into the death of his father Gustaf - another lawyer - who was killed recently in a traffic accident. Wallander suggests he approach an active policeman, and believes this to be the end of the matter, only for Sten himself to be found dead a few days later.
This double tragedy galvanises Wallander to reverse his decision to retire, as well as spurring him to resolve not to ignore approaches like this in the future (in typical Wallander style, he blames himself for Sten's death), and he's soon back in his familiar office in the Ystad police. His colleagues seem not to have changed much, although the department has gained the highly-regarded young recruit Ann-Britt Höglund, who appears to have arrived with some emotional baggage as well as new ideas about the role of the police in the rapidly-changing Swedish society.

Wallander's investigation - and it really is Wallander's investigation, Mankell is happy to relegate the rest of the department to the background, and really only draws Höglund in three dimensions for most of the novel - takes a series of dramatic turns and rapidly enters Mankell's customary page-turning territory. Financial chicanery, black-market dealings in the developing world, car bombings, suspicious suicides and even a landmine are the order of the day, and the tension ratchets up to a very high level.
Overlaid on this is Wallander's personal life. He's still a workaholic and an alcoholic, and his relationships with his daughter and father are as complex as ever. In the latter case, Lioness saw his father announce his intention to marry his home-help, and this marriage has taken place by the start of the present novel, which of course only serves to complicate things. In addition, having spent 18 months on leave, Wallander feels that his instincts can't always be trusted in certain respects, which presents additional challenges for a policeman more than happy to go it alone in pursuit of a solution.

Perhaps the strangest aspect of The Man Who Smiled is the opening, which reveals at least some of the identity of the killer and a portion of the motive. Little vignettes like these are of course entirely common in crime fiction, but in this instance it has the odd result of moving the novel from standard "whodunit" territory into an unusual attempt at the "whydunit".
This may not be a fair claim, to be honest. The strictest definition of the "whydunit" is one in which we see the crime committed at the outset, but the challenge is to work out the motive (the works of R Austin Freeman, among others, are the landmarks of this style), and we are given at least part of that motive to begin with. The other possibility is to see this as an attempt at the "howcatchem", a style of novel which connects to many of the procedural TV shows (think of the assorted Law and Order spin-offs here) in which we as viewers know exactly how everything went down, but we're still cheering for the police as they painstakingly put the pieces together. Whether it works all the time to translate this to the novel is somewhat up for debate, but I feel it does here, as there's more than enough tension and plenty of by-play with office politics and so on as well.

If there's one point on which the novel falls down ever so slightly, it would be the identity of the villain. A lot of the plot relies on the villain being one step - or several steps - ahead of Wallander and his team, and one almost expects the final scenes to involve the unmasking of a mole in the police department, but this is explained in the end as being due to police carelessness, rather than anything more sinister.
The villain himself gets what can only be called a James Bond moment towards the end, where he "confesses" to a captured Wallander and outlines chapter and verse of what's been going on. Admittedly, most of these facts are known already, but with as many plot threads as this novel has, it was always going to be welcome to bring everything together somewhere along the line, artificial though this final moment may be.
That said, Mankell makes up for the almost cartoonishly omnipotent villain by delivering a climax in which Wallander "persuades" Höglund to ignore the chain of command - which by now is demonstrably getting in the way of the investigation anyway - and race against time to stop a private jet taking off. The result is just the right side of the line between comic and exciting, and it's easy to see why this is one of the novels that both Swedish and British directors have adapted for television.

All told, this is Mankell at his finest. He even finds the time to work in links to the rest of the series, with the re-appearance of a character from The Dogs of Riga, as well as more links to his other passion of Africa. Wallander is a much better-drawn character than he was in The White Lioness, and by the end of the novel there are several other characters who promise a lot for the next instalment.

Four and a half stars.

Ian Rankin - "The Impossible Dead"

Think of Edinburgh in novel form, and you're probably thinking of either Irvine Welsh's gritty realism in Trainspotting or Ian Rankin's troubled DI John Rebus in the series of the same name. While I have a lot of time for Welsh's work, I'll probably always be thinking of Rebus first, as his inaugural outing was as far back as 1987's Knots and Crosses, while Renton, Begbie and the others were first seen in 1993. Regardless, we can safely say that Ian Rankin was writing about crimes in Scotland long before Scotland was cool.

While Rankin is justifiably lauded for his Rebus novels, he experienced the same dilemma that many novelists with a long-running series character do - namely, what to do with all the other interesting plot ideas that Rebus simply couldn't investigate. Therefore, 2007's Exit Music was intended to be Rebus' swansong, and 2009 saw the debut of Malcolm Fox, a member of "Complaints and Conduct" (or "Professional Standards and Ethics") in Rebus' old Lothian and Borders Police. The Complaints, as the department is known, and as the first Fox novel is titled, are hardly the most popular section of any police department, as they need to investigate the police themselves.
Fox is therefore able to conduct investigations - and get into situations - that Rebus would never be able to. It's a strange change of gears in a way, as much of the visceral power of Rebus as a character comes from his willingness to skirt around inconvenient procedures to get his result (he famously has a method for "the perfect Scottish murder", taking advantage of the high fat and oil content of the typical Edinburgh diet), and suddenly the reader needs to identify with someone unambiguously on the side of good.
That said, I believe that most authors who write police-procedural crime will eventually find themselves dabbling in "internal affairs"-style plots. The temptation for double- and triple-crossing as well as all manner of high crimes and misdemeanours is simply too great.

2011's The Impossible Dead is Malcolm Fox's second outing, and begins with Fox and his team - including junior partners Naysmith and Kaye - looking to round up some loose ends in an investigation in Kirkcaldy. Detective Paul Carter has been all but drummed out of the force due to sexual assault charges, and Fox's team has been sent in from Edinburgh to establish whether perjury charges need to be laid against any of Carter's colleagues.
The case is made more complicated by the unwillingness of anyone in Kirkcaldy to co-operate. Fox's team are outsiders, as well as being the despised "Complaints", and Carter was seen as a man who got things done, regardless of exact method. Additionally, the evidence against Carter came from his uncle - a former policeman himself - and this seems to cast things in a very negative light indeed for many being investigated.
As the team investigates - stepping on toes in the best Rankin fashion - the plot proceeds to thicken. Carter's uncle is found dead, seemingly shot by a gun which "shouldn't exist", and Fox is constantly drawn to obscure political events in the mid-1980s when fringe Scottish Nationalists attempted to press their case in the same way that the IRA was in Ireland. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the body count continues to rise, and Fox finds himself having to investigate crimes which may have had their origin in complicated political plotting in London.

All of this should add up to an impressive plot, and on paper it does. Ultimately, though, it just seems to fall flat. The unravelling of conspiracies within conspiracies seems to rely very heavily on coincidence and the sudden arrival of characters who are introduced without any real logic (one suspect is never given a physical description until after the investigators start wondering if he fits the one given by a witness, which seems either unfair or the result of poor editing). Fox, for example, manages to work out the identity of two key figures in the 1980s plot in the exact same way, but several chapters apart. While the method itself (the sudden inspiration one has when falling asleep) is plausible, the fact that it happens twice smacks of lazy plotting to me.
It's also clear that the plot Rankin wanted to write was his 1980s-terrorism one. The uncle-and-nephew-cops plot keeps vanishing from the pages almost entirely, only for Naysmith or Kaye to appear by phone and recount exhaustive detail of an interview or further evidence, often dealing with events several chapters ago. Given that Rebus has (in 2002's Resurrection Men) investigated an old cold case, it's not entirely clear why this had to be Fox's case, either, except perhaps that Rankin needed a break from Rebus.
There are a couple of the almost requisite scenes of Fox being "warned off", but these don't seem to have any of the menace such a scene should. Even the climax of the novel relies on a relatively obvious trick Fox plays on a suspect, which dissipates at least some of the tension.
The net result is that what could well have made a cracking read at about 200-300 pages winds up being rather bloated at more than 420. Justice is, at least to a certain point, served by the end of the novel, but it's hard to get too worked up about the "baddies" losing out, as every major character outside of Fox's team doesn't seem as "real" as they otherwise might.

My other concern with the Malcolm Fox novels is Fox himself. It's almost as if Rankin wanted to create an "anti-Rebus", by having Fox as almost the archetypically "good cop". We learn that he studied well at school, has been a high-flyer in the force (one has to be to get into "The Complaints"), doesn't drink and tries to take care of his sister and aged father as best he can. His only character flaw seems to be a short-lived marriage which fell apart due to both of them focusing too hard on their careers. In contrast to the hard-drinking, trouble-causing Rebus with his complicated personal entanglements, Fox is just too anodyne to work as a series character. Even the attempt to give Fox a "troubled sister" doesn't seem to work, as Rankin doesn't appear keen to give Jude a backstory.
This isn't to say that the "good cop" is automatically boring. Donna Leon's Guido Brunetti is anything but a bad cop, but at least is willing to bend regulations when required. Fox launches into any amount of existential doubt when he does so, and Rankin seems happy to allow him the "out" of getting Naysmith or Kaye to actually do the wrong thing when required.
I feel, too, that the other issue with Fox is that he's introduced to us as a complete character. Rebus, over 17 novels and any number of short stories, grew into a well-rounded human being. Fox just appears in his first novel, without any of the hang-ups that a distinguished police career would normally give someone. A character cut from the whole cloth like that is going to be harder to appreciate, and it feels like a misstep.

Finally, it also feels that the sense of place is missing here. Much of this investigation takes place in and around Kirkcaldy, as against The Complaints which was in Edinburgh. With the exception of the occasional reference to Scotland (or Fox's father ending the novel with the toast "Here's tae us, wha's like us? Gey few, and they're a' deid"), we could really be anywhere. Yes, there's a Scottish political subplot, but Rankin doesn't seem to have captured any local flavour in this. Peculiarly, though, this may well be the first Rankin novel in which British politics is mentioned - David Cameron and his coalition with Nick Clegg are expressly name-checked near the end.

All in all, this is hardly Rankin's best work. The good news is that by 2012, Rankin had decided to bring Rebus back (alongside Fox).

For completists. Two stars.

Donna Leon - "A Question of Belief"

Venice in August is a truly oppressive place, and even more so for Donna Leon's long-suffering Commissario Guido Brunetti, here in his 19th outing exploring the assorted crimes and misdemeanours lurking beneath the surface of that tourist drawcard. Where About Face featured a freezing winter, A Question of Belief demonstrates that stifling humidity which much of Europe suffers as their summer draws to a close. Not for no reason do many Italians take a holiday in August - a fact which plays a number of roles in Brunetti's investigations here.

In typical Leon fashion, A Question of Belief begins in a low-key manner. Brunetti is approached by his investigative partner Vianello who is troubled by his aunt's recent fascination with horoscopes and astrology. While both men agree that this could well be the harmless interest of a mature woman, Vianello at least seems to think that Zia Anita's interest verges on the unhealthy.
No sooner has this question been raised, when Brunetti is contacted by a former schoolfriend who is concerned regarding irregularities at the Tribunale, Venice's court. It appears that certain cases are being delayed (delayed longer than normal, both men remark) to the possible advantage of one party, and that the cases delayed in such a way are brought before a certain judge and administered by a certain clerk.
It is unclear whether anything here is a crime. Brunetti, in fact, asks his friend what he wants him to do, and receives the response, "I hoped you might be able to think of something to do. And I hoped you'd be outraged by it." Brunetti recognises that something is potentially at issue - particularly if money is changing hands - but is resigned to the customary willingness of the Italian establishment to ignore such matters.

Perhaps needless to say, things do develop from here, albeit at Leon's customarily languid pace. Vianello's concerns about his aunt become slightly more serious, as she seems intent on giving large amounts of the family savings to what he describes as "a soothsayer", leading to a very impressive sequence featuring no fewer than three detectives (Brunetti, a young trainee and the under-utilised Pucetti) tailing the woman across Venice to find out the destination of the funds. Again, in the way that only Leon ever really could, the climax of the scene is a deadpan series of remarks at the expense of Venetian real estate prices, brought about by Brunetti's seemingly-inexhaustible understanding of the landscape of the city and its distinctive cadastral street-numbering system.

But of course this is a murder mystery, and Brunetti eventually finds himself suffering the ignoble fate of being recalled from his family vacation in the Italian Alps (along with Vianello, who's been brought back from the Croatian coast on a Coast Guard launch) to investigate the crime. The initial phone call recalling Brunetti, incidentally, is made by Commissario Claudia Griffoni, who was introduced in About Face and perhaps is on the verge of become another series regular - not a bad idea, as the main female characters in the series so far can occasionally become ciphers when Leon needs to cover a lot of plot very quickly.
Brunetti's investigation sees him take in everywhere from the Tribunale itself to the city's medical testing centre and the iconic Madonna dell'Orto church, all of which are described in Leon's inimitable manner. The locations are, of course, real anyway, but reading them there is a palpable sense of them jumping off the page.

It wouldn't be a Donna Leon novel without the domestic interludes, either. While the Brunetti family spend most of the novel in the Alps (and even his in-laws don't get much of a look-in - his redoubtable mother-in-law is only at the end of a phone twice, while his father-in-law is completely absent), we are compensated for this with an extended family dinner scene earlier in the novel. Brunetti's son Raffi is described as having recently adopted Marxism, only to discard it just as quickly, while his daughter Chiara is still the family's conscience, particularly in relation to air-conditioning in the Venetian heat.
The cynicism of both Brunetti and his wife Paola seems to have almost completely rubbed off on both children, though, despite the best intentions of their parents. Given that the series has shown Raffi and Chiara growing up, it becomes increasingly difficult not to view them almost as the children of old friends by this point - one is almost tempted to say "My, how you've grown" on first "meeting" them in the pages of their next novel.

Additionally, the comedy of the Questura is front and centre here. This is very much a good thing, as some parts of this novel do at least attempt to pose tricky questions to the reader (the relationship between psychology and fortune-telling is one such, as is the question of what makes a person "good"), so light relief is never a bad idea.
Vice-Questore Patta is his usual officious self, and his rationales for alternately permitting and preventing Brunetti from doing the most logical things are as cynical as ever. His underling, Lieutenant Scarpa, doesn't get much of an outing here, although the views of many of the detectives about his abilities as a trainer are definitely amusing.
And of course there is the amazing Signorina Elettra, secretary to the Vice-Questore and hacker extraordinaire. Whether or not her skills are remotely plausible is largely irrelevant, as she gets some of the best lines of all here - including her explanation of a purchase order for new computers, her description of the challenges of obtaining certain phone records, and her glorious re-telling of a "date" during which she has attempted to ferret out information for Brunetti.

The real star here in many ways is the city of Venice itself. Not necessarily the landscape, but the culture. Brunetti himself begins his investigation into the Tribunale irregularities by pondering that he knows "a general good feeling" about the judge involved, and a strong theme here (as ever in Leon) is the power of gossip and rumour in a small town like Venice. Key plot developments are arrived at by the power of what characters aren't saying, and Brunetti is asked on several occasions how he intends to prevent reputational damage to his suspects and the victim.
The food, too, is as central as ever. Contrary to common tourist opinion, Venice is a city of great food, and Leon takes considerable pains in describing the plates of chicchetti which are ordered at some points, and the vast array of tramezzini Brunetti and Vianello indulge in during their investigations. Even a takeaway pizza Brunetti buys near the end of the case sounds very appetising indeed.

In all of this, it's tempting to wonder if one strand of the plot may have taken a back seat. Indeed, Vianello does precisely this at one point. While the two investigations don't necessarily move at the same speed, there are surprising and unusual links between them. Leon's mastery of the crime novel form allows her to play around with the idea of the "unconnected cases" in a way that only a writer with a long-established series can.
The conclusions, when they arrive, are satisfyingly unexpected. The solution to the murder may be a little trite for some tastes, but the logic hangs together, and allows Brunetti one last stab at the quirks of criminal justice before his well-deserved return to the Alps and the end of his Ferragosto vacation.

Donna Leon has categorically done it again. Five stars

Arnaldur Indriðason - "Silence of the Grave"

Reykjavík is the northernmost capital city in the world, just a short distance south of the Arctic Circle. The country it governs - Iceland - is like nowhere else on the planet. This is an island with some 300,000 inhabitants, almost all of whom are direct descendants of the Vikings, and who speak a language closer to the Old Norse of legends and sagas than anything else spoken today. Even the landscape is seemingly from another planet - lava plains and thermal pools predominate, with the island featuring a seemingly endless collection of jagged fjords on its rugged coastline.
Iceland is, to put it mildly, a harsh and unforgiving place. It's also a place which doesn't appear often in the annals of history after the population converted en masse to Christianity around the year 1000 - until recent years when the entire country went bankrupt in one of the more spectacular offshoots of the Global Financial Crisis. It is also, despite being part of Scandinavia, much less on the "ScandiCrime" radar than it should be. While Sweden, Denmark and Norway have a seemingly-endless parade of authors to offer, Iceland's noir qualities seem overlooked with only a couple of exceptions.

One such exception is Arnaldur Indriðason, the author of the Detective Erlendur series, often referred to as the "Reykjavík Murder Mysteries".
Erlendur - Icelanders don't customarily have surnames so much as they have patronymics, so while Erlendur's full name is "Erlendur Sveinsson", that just simply means his father's name was Svein, so he's not "Detective Sveinsson" at all - is the head of a small team in the Reykjavík CID. While it's implied that the team consists of more than the three main characters, we're never really introduced to them, so we get to know a lot about Erlendur and rather a bit less about his younger partner Sigurður Óli and their colleague Elínborg.

Silence of the Grave (Icelandic: Grafarþögn) is chronologically the fourth of Erlendur's cases, but only the second translated into English. This is a common quirk when dealing with ScandiCrime. As many novelists don't necessarily "hit their stride" with their first or second novel, publishers in the Anglophone world are increasingly hesitant to translate anything but a sure-fire hit, and often the earlier novels go untranslated for some time (Norway's Jo Nesbø is another victim of this, having only recently seen his first two novels appear in English), until a fan-base can be shown to exist.
We begin in a typically Icelandic way, with a very spare and very dramatic opening. As translated, the opening line of this novel runs "He knew at once that it was a human bone, when he took it from the baby who was sitting on the floor chewing it." Indeed, the translation is really one of the stars of the show here. Icelanders by temperament are taciturn individuals given to a very dour sense of humour, and the late Bernard Scudder was a master at converting their turn of phrase into highly readable English without destroying the essential "Icelandic-ness" of the words.
As the scene develops, it is revealed that a skeleton has been discovered buried underground in a newly-developing area of Reykjavík. Erlendur and his team are dispatched to investigate further, and enlist the help of a young archaeologist, who provides a slightly under-utilised point of comic relief by his constant reminders that excavating the bones is a slow and painstaking process (the police, more used to fresher corpses, find this very difficult to deal with). After confirming that this isn't an unknown Viking-era burial - a surprisingly common discovery in Iceland - the team gets to work attempting to find out what's behind the grisly discovery.

Much of the novel is given over to Erlendur's own family life. In the earlier Jar City (Icelandic: Mýrin), we learned that he had been divorced from his wife Halldóra for many years and had two adult children with whom he had a very difficult relationship. The focus here is on his relationship with his daughter Eva Lind, who has spent much of her life dealing with drug addiction and repeated attempts to go clean. We also learn a little of Erlendur's childhood - a theme to which Arnaldur returns in later novels.
This is possibly a good thing, as it serves to break up the chapters focusing on the investigation. As the death is agreed to have occurred some decades ago, this is an investigation involving a lot of talking to middle-aged and elderly people who frequently have faulty memories of key events, which of course means that there is much less driving around chasing active criminals. Personally, I didn't at all find these interactions boring, as they play into a frequent Arnaldur theme - that secrets lurk beneath the surface in every family or workplace, and that they often have unexpected consequences years later.

Another plot strand is a narrative regarding a young woman in WW2-era Reykjavík. The history of Iceland during the war is somewhat unusual, in that it took advantage of the Nazi occupation of Denmark to declare independence and neutrality, only to be occupied by the UK and US armies in succession, with American influence continuing into the modern day (Reykjavík is home to what is often regarded as the "world's best hot dog stand", and I can attest to its incredible qualities). This was overlaid onto what was at that point still a relatively rural environment - Reykjavík is described by one character as "really just a big town then" - creating a profound social change the likes of which the rest of Europe never really experienced. Going too far into this narrative is to give part of the game away, but I will say that it's a relatively disturbing one at times.

Thankfully, this gloom is balanced out by some enjoyably comic scenes featuring Sigurður Óli and his partner Bergþóra, who is keen to get married and start a family, while he has perhaps some other ideas.

The conclusion to the investigation ties up most of the loose ends, although there are some issues raised from the memories of the various people interviewed that never quite get resolved. In a sense, this simply mirrors real life, where family secrets can be raked over without any real resolution. This can, however, be a minor disappointment when it appears that everything "should" be tied up in the way that most crime novels are.

Arnaldur is in many ways quite a "literary" crime writer. While crimes are committed, investigated and resolved in his novels, a lot of this structure is really an apparatus on which he hangs an interrogation of his own society.
Scandinavian though Iceland may well be, its history and development have been quite different to the social-democratic norms on the mainland. Immigration has been lower, and thus multiculturalism has never really become as dominant a force as in cosmopolitan Norway, Denmark and Sweden. The hard-bitten realities of what realistically remained a predominantly rural society until the post-war "Cod Wars" and the sudden increase in wealth they brought mean that it's only been the last few generations of Icelanders who have really had the same experiences as many others have.
Of course, Arnaldur is far from the only crime novelist to do this. Historically, even Wilkie Collins used The Moonstone to make social commentary, and more recently the obvious touch-stone is the late Stieg Larsson and his first novel - famously titled in Swedish Män som hatar kvinnor ("Men who hate women") before its translation to English as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Detectives, ultimately, investigate crimes in the societies in which they live, and most crimes do speak about the societies in which they're committed.

All of this is by way of indicating that Silence of the Grave and the other Erlendur novels aren't your standard-issue crime thrillers. They're written to make you think, and perhaps to look at the world in a different way. Not exactly your standard rainy-day escapism that you might think of when the topic of "crime fiction" comes up".

 A very strong recommendation. Five stars.